Houdini Quickstart Tutorials – Column Base

The next part of Houdini was the quickstart tutorial which showed me how to model a column in Houdini and then cause a domino effect between a series of columns in order to break them apart. At present I have the column modelled and am going to move on to animating it today.

As there is so much to show I have to break up this tutorial into sections I began with creating the column base in which the stem of the column would then be created.

To begin I had to create a box and then scale it in the origin of the scene to make it appear like this I was then shown through all the different view tools in order to get this screen this make it easier when modelling an object as you can see it from various angles at once.

I had to sue the polyextrude tool to build up the layers of the column base like so by pressing the Q key I was able to open the tool I had just used to so every time I wanted to make a new layer for the base I pressed Q and then extruded that level and repeated.

As I repeated this process and build up the levels of the base I had to then smooth out the levels and then lower them down to make it appear more realistic. This was done by changing the translate, scale and the inset.

When it came to selecting edges I found this a lot easier to do than in maya all that is required of the user is to click on one of the edges and press the L key to select all the relevant edges connected to that one edge like in the image below.

Creating repetitions adds more geometry into the chosen piece of geometry, This enabled me to make the shape higher again but give me more edges to play with for smoothing out the base. The more repetitions the more edges that were available to bevel.

When using the bevel I had to select the bevel type which was high density round instead of flat the repetitions were also increased so that more edges were available. The tool I was using is called the Polybevel.

The bevel stage continued until I got this result. In the image below all of the bevels have been done and I am using the L key again in order to select edges of the object a little faster. The base of the object was scaled again in order to get it looking good.

This image shows the process of mirroring the base of the column this was done by using the mirror tool and by setting the direction of the mirrored object and the distance that it would appear away from the original.

Here is the final result of the mirrored column bases that now leads me on to the creation of the column stem itself.